1) I attended a puppet show performance of John Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River.
2) I saw my first butterflies of the year.
3) I picked up used copies of V.S. Pritchett’s A Cab at the Door and Midnight Oil, Henry James’s The Ambassadors, and Balzac’s Pere Goriot.
4) I saw a red-winged blackbird singing in the boughs of a mustard plant near the edge of San Francisco Bay; that verse in the New Testament about birds nesting in mustard plants had always seemed so unlikely, but then I’d never seen mustard eight feet tall before.
5) I made the acquaintance of a lovely young woman whose father was a UFO chaser and once took the family on a camping trip to Mt Shasta after being informed by a Ouija board that a flotilla of saucers had scheduled a meet-up there.
6) I held my breath for three minutes and ten seconds (a personal best).
7) I visited an Egyptology museum operated by the Rosicrucians and with my four-year-old daughter in my arms considered the wrapped-up mummy of a four-year-old girl who died three thousand years ago.
That, Ian, is what I call a record of a week. It’s all salience. Pure salience. I’ve considered the lilies of the field, and neglected, as they do, to spin. But I have never encountered evidence of the infallibility of the scripture in a mustard plant. Now, verify that bit about the mustard seed: “for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you….” Try that out on Mt. Shasta.
Yours, Mark
That’s the very tricky part.